The villagers in Egebeleku community have clean water. Shell built the project, powered by solar panels, to improve relations with the local communities they work alongside in the oil-rich but notoriously volatile Niger Delta.
Yet as company officials beamed at a young girl filling a battered kettle from the new village tap, there was a persistent whisper from the youths surrounding the visitors. “Put me in the Shell work, I need a job; I don’t have any work at all.” The pleas of the youths lie at the heart of the problems that haunt Africa’s biggest oil producer.
Last weekend’s siege of three flow stations belonging to ChevronTexaco and Shell Nigeria has been resolved peacefully. About 120 000 barrels a day were shut in after several hundred unarmed villagers from the Kula community descended on the facilities, 100km south-west of Port Harcourt. Men, women and children sang and danced as they demanded more community development projects and jobs. One hundred staff were detained for three days.
By Tuesday evening most of the protesters had left the platforms. Talks planned for Wednesday between community leaders and the oil companies were cancelled after leaders wanted the venue shifted from Government House in Port Harcourt to the community itself. They also asked for the Niger Delta Development Commission, set up to oversee community projects in the Delta, to become involved.
Negotiations were scheduled to resume on Thursday afternoon and production remained suspended, costing the oil companies and the government more than $4,5-million a day.
The pattern of occupation and negotiation is common. Frustration against the oil giants, accused of exploiting the country’s natural resources without returning anything to the communities, frequently erupts into violence.
At the end of last month, seven people were alleged to have been killed and one is missing after the army opened fire on members of the Ojobo community.
The villagers had occupied a plat- form operated by Shell subsidiary Parker Drilling to protest about delays in development projects and employment contracts.
Shell confirmed that it was investi-gating the matter, although it was unable to give a single example of when a complaint by the company about the use of excessive force had resulted in the dismissal of a member of the security forces. Hundreds of people die in clashes in the Delta every year, many of them shot by state security forces defending oil installations.
This September, threats to blow up oil facilities by militant Aljahi Dokubo Asari pushed oil prices beyond $50 a barrel. Many of his men said they were fighting for the same reasons that the Kula villagers were protesting.
Oil executives point out that taxes levied by the government can reach 74% of production costs, and say the government should distribute the wealth to the people.
However, in the country that Transparency International ranked the third-most corrupt in the world, billions of dollars simply disappear.
Oil companies often end up building short-term projects to temporarily placate the local community while drilling continues. Although managers insist that this is changing, the Delta is littered with roads that lead nowhere, hospitals with no medicine and pylons that carry no electricity.
“So much of this development is unsustainable,” noted Patterson Ogun, a founding director of the Ijaw Council for Human Rights.
“The oil companies and the government, who is a Joint Venture partner in every facility, have a responsibility to the places where they do business. We need to include local people from the very beginning.”